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The fossilization of memory. Sounds too scientific, too pedagogic. Very much like the notes I used to write in Zoology, only in a sentimental context. Note that this blog is a hole in my failing consciousness. Should you leave this blog wondering about things, e-mail me at utakgago [at] gmail [dot] com for questions, job offers, and for-the-lack-of-a-breather e-mails. Subscribe via RSS.

Oh, that’s a tornado I saw from the window?

Okay, I was so engrossed with Adam Haslett’s book (featured in this post, in case you haven’t heard) that I haven’t thought that the black wispy clouds in front of my dormitory room’s window happened to be a tornado (see videos here and here). Yes, I was there. It was around 4 pm when it happened. The winds were unusually strong and everything’s dark that I decided not to attend to my LTS1 class since I lost my umbrella and winds are strong and maybe because - like I’ve said - I’m quite concentrated with the book.

I only learned that it was a tornado when I dined with my friends four hours later. They were talking about the tornado and I felt stupid when I told them that I’ve seen roofs, fishing nets - and even a t-shirt for chrissake - flying in front of my window without even thinking that it was something worse. Well I thought it was just usual to see roofs flying - I mean, I haven’t thought of it as a roof since they were shattered into pieces anyway. There were just lots of debris flying but I haven’t seen the conical shape or the outline of the tornado. I should’ve at least planned to take a video of that tornado. Heh.

It’s probably one of my wildest fantasies, seeing a live tornado. I dunno - it’s something to brag during conversations. But who cares? Seeing a tornado isn’t that good a thing. Oh, wait. Maybe I’m thrilled to see one since I haven’t for my entire life. I’ve seen rainbows and naked people but never a live tornado. A flesh-to-flesh encounter with a tornado.

Now I challenge you to say a tongue twister I discovered: Lloyd Load. Say it ten times. Will you?

See, I’m really bored. I should’ve seen the tornado and maybe I could’ve come up with a better post about my experience with the tornado. Next time I’ll do my best to go near it. And of course I’ll manage to stay alive and take a picture of it and put it in this blog. Wow. Just wow.

By the way, belated/advanced happy birthday to Shari and Angel. We guys should get some booze, you know. And congratulations to Ms. Janette Toral and to the winners of this year’s Top 10 Emerging and Influential Blogs. You guys know who you are. :)

Talk about nonsense. I’m tired.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on August 16, 2008 at 10:24 pm, filed under Events, Slang and random, Stupid and tagged , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

In case you haven’t heard.

Willful submission

Something’s terribly wrong with me while taking the Macroeconomics exam. Willful submission, I would like to call it. I was at peace. Surrender from the bullets of all those mathematical equations, I told myself. Days ago I have been planning on making homemade bombs made of chicken’s proventriculi soaked in gasoline (a much-celebrated delicacy on the university’s outskirts) that would successfully detonate itself with a button’s click at my professor’s office, hopefully destroying the exam copies or anything to postpone the exam but after thinking about lighting a pack of these entrails I suddenly thought of abandoning the bullshit. In Fight Club, Palahniuk listed on certain recipes for homemade bombs: two quarts of nitroglycerin, orange juice, wood shavings, but my attempt was loosely planned. So maybe I had to take the exam - the awful one-and-a-half hour exam - the exam that made students yelp and grasp for tissue papers in hopes of blotting their bleeding noses.

Where had I gotten myself into? Nowhere. I was really good with theoretical questions, if you want to know the truth, but it only had forty points to push my way out of the pits of hell. The graphical analysis was definitely easy but the computation bored me. I was just skinning my lips throughout the examination the way troubled catatonics would do things like that in this absent-minded way, staring at an imaginary conduit, thinking about morphing this whole dungeon into something else. But - oh well - I failed the exam and I’m sure of it.

After the exam, I briskly walked straight to my dorm and slept for four full hours. This is my vacation.

-

Haslett stories

There’s something about short stories that really excites the hell out of me: the length of it. I was about to drill a hole on my laptop reading Murakami’s ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle‘ not really because it was exceptionally boring (well, it wasn’t on some parts) but it was awfully long (compared with his short stories, obviously). Also, I can’t see any progress. The scenes down the well goes on and on until it lulls you to sleep. It’s enchantingly weird, yes. It’s definitely this deranged, out-of-this-world kind of novel. But it lacks the suspense. Kumiko’s whereabouts was not yet even mentioned ever since she left Toru’s house on the first few chapters of the novel.

However, Murakami’s ‘After Dark‘ barks the other way around: it’s a short story with seemingly brutal pincers to drag you close to the story no matter how distant you are.

J.D Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ for me is a short story (I have yet to know the standards for consideration to render a story short or novel in length). David Sedaris’s ‘Me Talk Pretty One Day‘ is an anthology of wildly entertaining short stories enough to make you laugh pretty longer than a usual Bob Ong book would do (err, I can’t remember myself laughing while reading ‘Ang Paboritong Libro ni Hudas‘). And Jessica Zafra’s ‘Twisted‘ series, of course.

However, Adam Haslett’s ‘You Are Not a Stranger Here‘ is a startling literary debut, somewhat close to Jhumpa Lahiri and her startling Pulitzer prize-winning debut, ‘The Interpreter of Maladies‘ in terms of its approach and its impeccable choice of concepts and storylines. But Lahiri’s work is more of cultural - focusing on Indian immigrants and some third-world stories; Haslett’s work is more of experimental and psychological. I’ve read three stories from his abovementioned anthology of short stories and all turned out to be clasically good and heart-warming (especially the story about this mother who got four digits of her right hand chopped away with a meat cleaver by his meth-drugged son, really dramatic).

Short stories are somewhat made for the hectic and for the work-bloated. When in the mood, I would read these short stories while waiting for a jeepney ride - you rarely miss the story since you can still manage to keep up with the pacing, and the fact that it’s short urges you to hasten your progress (since a back-to-back leaf can be read within a minute) and finish the story.

And oh, it costs forty pesos. One of the million things to love thrift shops like Booksale.

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In case you haven’t heard

Well, I’m sick. I’m having bouts of frustration these days ever since I lost my flash drive (which explains the minimal blogging), my umbrella, my newly-bought lighter and recently, my laptop charger. All of them lost in an entire week. Oftentimes, when these things happen in daily succession as if it contains an underlying pattern around it (chaos theory?), I can’t help but blame things. Probably there are dwarves around. Or thieves fancily dressed and invisible. Or ghosts. Or distractions - yes, probably I’ve had enough exams these days to make me lose the nuts and bolts which were keeping my head intact.

  • The loss of the flash drive was indeterminable: I can’t even remember where I left it, when I last used it (but I can’t help but suspect that it’s in my bedroom). The loss of the umbrella was pure stupidity: I left it on the jeepney ride, but it was really thoughtful of that lady besides me to call me in this hushed, respectful tone as if I was born precisely a decade ago before her: “Kuya, yung payong mo.”
  • So I reprimanded myself and told myself to keep it on my bag, but I hadn’t. I lost it while I was constantly reminding myself to keep it - ironic, I know. I was in Laguna when it suddenly occurred to me that I forgot to pack my umbrella on my bag, so it’s probably sitting on the red-leathered passenger seats of that bus that brought me to Cubao.
  • The lighter got lost after I slept on a friend’s house. I wrapped it on my handkerchief while sleeping and the next thing I know it was gone. Both the umbrella and the lighter were newly-bought: the umbrella was a week old, the lighter lasted for a good hour on my property.
  • I discovered that I lost the charger Tuesday night since my laptop went low-bat and it took me forever to find the charger. Then, it occurred to me that I lost the charger. So the next day I went to the barracks-shaped computer shop and asked the management if ever they were fortunate enough to retrieve a lost charger for a Dell Inspiron 6000 model, black in color. “No sir.” I told them that I was one of the customers that night who was surfing the net using their Wi-Fi. “No sir,” they insisted.

I started calling myself stupid, absent-minded, dimwit, anything else that could demoralize my morale. I’m such a lousy guy who keeps on forgetting things: was it a short-term amnesia that specializes in gadgets? Or may an amnesia for black things? See, my umbrella, my lighter, my laptop charger and my flash drive were all black. Or maybe those were black dwarves..

Then I asked myself: Where will I buy such a charger? Gilmore. Yes, Gilmore, the Mecca for technogeeks. But where will I get money? My Dad would scold me to death for losing four things (three, since the lighter shall not be mentioned ever) all at the same week.

I found the charger Wednesday afternoon at the same house where I lost my lighter. I left the charger there.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on August 13, 2008 at 7:18 pm, filed under 2in1, Books, books, books, Life at UPLB, Opinion, Stress ball narratives and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Creative juices depleted.

I’m literally tired and exhausted so lemme just do this quick blogging.

That’s after I made two favors, each from two different friends. I made a one-page document (single-spaced, dammit) for a friend regarding my comments to PGMA’s SONA and another two-page document about Bayani Fernando being a presidentiable. How political.

And then I bought a book entitled “Simon Says” at Booksale.

And an umbrella. My automatic umbrella went haywire last Thursday. It costs 320 pesos, and I bought it somewhere around Laguna. It’s depressing, since I bought it A WEEK AGO. I hate myself for being such a clumsy guy destroying umbrellas and stuff.

Now I got a Fibrella, hoping that I won’t destroy it or something.

That’s just it.

UPDATE:

Another teen fiction, damn it.

“Charles Weston has always had a tough time following the rules. Even as a little kid, he refused to play games like Simon Says. Now a teenager, he spends most of his time alone, painting shocking pictures. Charles is convinced there is only one person in the world who will really understand him - Graeme Brandt, a young author whose novel he deeply connects with.”

So there I typed half of the back cover of the book by Elaine Marie Alphin entitled ‘Simon Says’ just for the hell of it. I bought it yesterday and it looked cool at first sight with a guy on the front page and his self-portrait and that’s just it. It looks like a memoir on a first glance. But the entire story really creeps me out. I don’t know why I bought this book. But it’s just 40 pesos! Really cheap.

I also bought ‘Billy Dead’ by Lisa Reardon (dunno why I bought this but it only costs 40 pesos anyway), and ‘You are Not a Stranger Here’, which is a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Finalist by Adam Haslett, and I’m wondering why it’s always a finalist for chrissake. But at least it was nominated. :)

What’s really good with Booksale is that it’s cheap and those books have lots of memories inside. My Dad bought this‘Milagro-Beanfield War’ book and it has this letter on the first page, saying a Happy Birthday. Another book has a Get Well Soon letter on one of the fly leaves of the book and it was obviously drawn by a kid with balloons, cute syringes and probably the cutest cough syrup bottles ever designed, another one has a bookmark, the other a calling card. I even found notes on Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Fight Club’ which I bought not on Booksale but along the streets of New York University.

So let’s just say that in one way or another, used books are even better than newly-bought books if you’re a sentimental person. It’s like having a book in a book, a memory in a memory. I don’t think it’s bad to buy used books as gifts - except if that person’s really grand and everything, but in my opinion, as long as the book’s neat to look at and had no missing pages whatsoever, it’s still a book. Maybe used once or twice, but I don’t really care.

-

Dad and I went to SM yesterday to fix my watches. Three watches, that is. A Swiss Hunter, A Nike (very sentimental traithlon-designed watch) and an Invicta (this watch I love the most: it’s the only graduation gift I’ve ever received). To our surprise, all of those watches cost 1250 pesos. Just to fix the batteries and some “circuits” the guy was telling us.

“What do you think?” Dad was asking.
“I’m okay with it.”
“Well it’s not okay for me since I’m going to pay it, right?” Sarcastic.
“Yeah, but you’ve been telling me for weeks that you’d fix my watch here.” Bahaha.

Parents rarely remember compromises. They could remember Saturday nightouts and electric bills and their businesses but never to go to the mall and fix their son’s watch (or at least give their son money for the fixing). Good thing I borrowed my Dad’s G-Shock for a week - he was pretty irritated since I stole it on his cabinet (but I texted him after I left the house en route Laguna) and I told him that all my watches are malfunctioning. I’m the brightest son in the world THAT moment. :)

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on August 3, 2008 at 8:22 pm, filed under Books, books, books, IRLs, Slang and random, Stress ball narratives and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.